GoMining rolled out its GoBTC Pay Bitcoin checkout system on June 19, offering merchants a direct payment route that bypasses Lightning, wrapped tokens, and fiat conversion at the point of sale. The system settles payments through GoMining's own mining infrastructure, giving merchants an instant confirmation while final on-chain settlement takes roughly 12 hours.
How it works
Customer payments broadcast to GoMining's dedicated pool and are prioritized for block inclusion. The merchant sees an instant confirmation, but the transaction isn't fully final until it lands on-chain — typically about half a day later. The setup uses a non-custodial 2-of-3 multisig model involving the user, GoMining, and an independent recovery custodian. That custodian's identity hasn't been disclosed.
Users pay no direct transaction fee. Merchants get charged 0.2%, split evenly between pool miners and the wallet provider that initiated the transaction. GoMining doesn't take a fee on third-party transactions.
The tradeoff
The concentration risk is real: merchants rely on GoMining's miner to control the route from checkout to final settlement. If that miner goes down or gets delayed, the whole payment flow stalls. The company pitches the system against card networks, citing Visa's 2024 merchant settlement data on cost and speed. But the comparison ignores that Visa's network is decentralized across thousands of processors.
Initial rollout covers up to 10 merchants and partners. GoMining says thousands more are on the waiting list.
The product roadmap includes a merchant POS terminal, a dashboard, SDK support, e-commerce plugins, P2P payments, a fiat off-ramp, and spending controls. No dates on any of those yet. For now, the system works as a web checkout — and the waiting list suggests demand is there, even if the architecture raises eyebrows among decentralization purists.
